Team Materia
by sanctum-c
Summary: After chasing a ninja all over Wutai and finally reclaiming all their materia, Avalanche discovers that Cid has managed to get this far without a weapon or having ever used any materia. This needs to be rectified. But was it the best idea sending him out with Cloud and Yuffie who is busily imparting the delights of truly large explosions to the ex-SOLDIER?


Cid Highwind scowled as he watched the other two dart ahead; the blonde ex-SOLDIER and the Wutai ninja. Why was he here again? Simple question. Not so simple answer. For one thing someone had to keep an eye on the two seemingly least stable members of this group. Cloud with his occasional headaches and tendency to stare into space, and Yuffie with her sticky fingers and her "what's yours is mine" attitude. It also didn't help that as a peace-offering the ninja, in addition to giving them all their materia back, had gotten into an involved discussion with their leader about effective materia combinations and the appeal of truly huge explosions. That and carving great chunks out of the scenery with summon spells. While the region south of Wutai was quite barren and bereft of anything important (a big reason why they were there in the first place), Cid was of the impression that the city to the north would be less then thrilled if they left the land in rather more pieces then they found it.

At least he wasn't just here to babysit, though a shudder racked him as he saw Yuffie hold up a red materia some distance ahead, afraid she was going to abruptly unleash the creature. Fortunately she was explaining something to Cloud, sliding the sphere into a pouch and withdrawing two green orbs instead. This was all kind of his fault; he'd rarely used magic before, not interested in calling forth the knowledge of the Ancients, sorry, the Cetra as Aeris had insisted on correcting him. He was interesting in mechanics, vehicles and space. Yet here he was, with a band of misfits tracking down the previously missing Sephiroth. Ostensibly his goal was to convince Rufus to restart the space program, but he was with this lot now, and the group made heavy use of materia; so he needed to get up to speed with it.

His fingers clutched at the spear in his hand. It had been a long time since he had last fought with such a weapon, and the group had insisted he re-familiarize himself with combat. From what the pilot could tell, the group had basically been in regular scrapes ever since they started out in Midgar, and no one expected them to take out Sephiroth without a lot of prior combat experience. Unlike the others, Cid had found himself in Wutai without a weapon, trying desperately not to dwell on exactly where his spear had wound up...

It had been a bad day. He'd aborted the rocket launch, screamed abuse at Shera for a good few hours and was now sulking in the cockpit of the Tiny Bronco; the least accessible place he could think of at the moment. He tried to lull himself with a moment of silence after ordering his terrified assistant to start making things up to him by doing his laundry. A nervous tap on the windshield destroyed his reverie.

He slammed the hatch open, leveling a glare at the woman. "What?"

"Um... captain? I finished the washing, but the washing line... When you- before," she hastily amended her sentence. "I just wanted you to know I'm going to get a replacement pole so I can hang it up."

"For fuck's sake Shera, improvise!" He cast about looking for something that could replace the bent, damaged pole he'd uprooted some hours before and proceeded to attack the house with. A brainwave hit him and he fished inside a compartment pulling out his dragoon lance. "Here, use this."

"Y-your spear?" quailed Shera. "C-captain, you shouldn't use something like that."

"Says who?" Cid hauled himself out of the plane and stalked across the lawn, before plunging the spear point first deep into the ground. "See? Perfectly good replacement." He reattached the severed washing line and stood back a moment to appraise his handiwork. "Works fine. Now do the fucking washing and leave me the fuck alone."

Shera flinched back as Cid stalked past her, and let out a sigh of relief as Cid settled back into the plane, eyes fixed on the lopsided Shinra-26 ahead of him.

No, it wouldn't do to let his new companions know that in a fit of anger he had recycled the antique weapon like that. He'd been initially evasive when they asked him if he could fight, and when he confirmed that, with what he fought. Things had finally calmed after chasing Yuffie around the city, and the Turks had swanned off to fail to look for Avalanche. The pilot had been harboring an idea that he should be able to pick up any weapon given half a chance, so asked to look over the group's spares. That had been another embarrassing spectacle. Cloud's swords he could barely stand upright, Barret's guns required a rather different arm then he had. While he could hold his own in a bar-room brawl and had several times, he could not bring himself to consider charging at monsters fist first as Tifa did. Red, no, Nanaki had claws and nothing to offer. That mechanized Moogle had megaphones which unless Cid wanted to shout his opponents to death (which admittedly did hold quite an appeal) weren't going to cut it. Yuffie offered him a shuriken which he came very close losing a foot to, and as much as he'd wanted to make use one of Vincent's array of pistols, his brief loan and inability to hit anything accurately more then a metre in front of him ended any thoughts of long-range fighting.

Tifa eventually decided to speed things up and ask exactly what Cid had used previously, and at the mention of spears, Aeris piped up and offered him a stave. This was more like it he'd thought, hefting the pole in one hand and getting a feel for it. He pivoted and launched it, watching disheartened as it landed with a muted clang on the ground. Aeris ran to retrieve it while Cloud sorted through their pooled money and dispatched Yuffie to find somewhere that sold spears.

And this was why he currently clutched a new spear in one hand. Now he just had to remember how to fight with it. It had been a long time. He glanced over at the excitable youths who were busily piling materia up on the ground, Yuffie animatedly gesturing to Cloud and pointing at various landmarks. Well, they weren't injuring anyone. At least not yet. It still rankled that he was stuck out here with both of them, when he could have practiced both spear and materia on his own without two vastly more experienced companions to critique him. But everyone else had something better to do. Vincent had vanished off as usual, Tifa and Aeris were eager to try out the local hot-springs, Barret was shopping for his kid, Cait Sith had bewilderingly basically switched off (Cid had spent some minutes prodding, pushing and then eventually kicking the robot to try and get it moving again, but it remained irritatingly inert), Nanaki had gone off to sleep... So that left him, the new guy with the kids.

With a sigh, Cid turned his back on the other two intending to run through what he remembered of spear fighting. With a quick glance to check that the duo were not messing with the summon materia right this second, he closed his eyes for a moment, calmed his breathing and slid into a fighting stance. An imaginary enemy flicked into being. Palmer. No, that didn't feel right somehow. President Shinra? No, he was already dead. Rufus. Now that held more of an appeal. He jabbed the spear forward intending to skewer his target, but imaginary Rufus turned with the spear jab and it missed. No matter, techniques, stances and styles were coming back to him and he swung the spear to follow.

It wasn't the best training, but it was workable. Certainly getting used to fighting like this was preferable to being face to face with some nasty in the wild and then discovering he was so rusty that he'd be felled before he started. He'd just finished an interesting cartwheeling flip, which swept imaginary Rufus' feet out from under him so he could bring his own feet down onto his enemy's torso and then plunge the spear point first into his head, when the explosion blew him over.

"What the fuck?" he yelled, pushing himself up on his hands. Now he thought about it the two of them had escaped his notice while he'd been running through his practice.

"Sorry Cid!" Yuffie ran up and looked down on him. Cid's eyes widened as he looked beyond her. He hadn't heard anything, but the pair of them had been busy. The field was charred, small fires still burning in places, ice-crystals stabbing up out of the water-logged ground.

"What the fuck was that?"

Cloud arrived a few seconds after Yuffie looking faintly embarrassed. "Sorry, that was my fault Cid."

"That's beside the point; Cloud has now discovered what happens if we use flare on ice crystals! Another score for Team Materia!" Yuffie shot her hand towards Cloud in a high-five that he matched, and they called out: "Go Team Materia!" in unison.

Cid groaned. He pulled himself into a sitting position and rolled his eyes before getting to his feet.

"Fan-fucking-tastic. Did you have to do your little experiment right next to me?"

Cloud scratched at the back of his neck as he replied. "Ah, no, well, I didn't mean to. It's just, if I hadn't cast the flare the ice would have hit you."

"Ice? I had fucking ice flying at me?! Care to explain why?" Cid's eyes narrowed.

"Accident," Cloud blurted.

"Yeah, that was a total accident," Yuffie interjected. "If you want to blame anyone, blame Shiva."

Cid stared at her. "What... who are you talking about?"

Yuffie sighed. "Gawd, old man, you really have missed out on materia."

Cid growled. "Shut it brat. I ain't that old."

"But you're so stuck in the old days. You haven't even touched any of the materia."

She held up a handful of the glowing spheres. Cid lit up a cigarette; he needed some stress relief.

"As of this moment, I don't care. Who is Shiva, and why is it her fault I got blown up?"

Cloud awkwardly shuffled the few materia he was holding and Yuffie looked evasive for a moment before responding to the scowling man. "Shiva's a summon. You do know what summon spells are right?"

Cid just held her gaze levelly.

"I'll take that as a yes then," chirped Yuffie. "Well, normally we've been only summoning one of them at a time. But I got to thinking; surely it would be better against something really tough to have more then one fight at the same time! Then we can double-team things. Or better; triple-team!"

Cid exhaled a plume of smoke. "Brat, I have a depressing sense that what you are about to say may very well explain why only one of those things is used at a time."

Yuffie fidgeted a little. "...you might be right."

"What happened then?"

Cloud cleared his throat and spoke up. "Well, first I summoned Ifrit." He turned and pointed to a particularly scorched area of the landscape. "Right there."

"So you must have summoned Shiva?" Cid turned to Yuffie.

"Yep."

"So it's your fault?"

Yuffie looked at the man stood beside her. "I still think it's more of Cloud's."

Cid would have expected the ex-SOLDIER to actually protest the accusation, but no, the man's gaze was studiously avoiding the pilot's accusatory eyes. He sighed. "For Ifrit or the flare?"

"Ifrit."

"...wait, wait, wait. Let me see if I have this straight; you summoned Shiva, and then tried to combine her attack with Ifrit's?"

"Pretty much." Yuffie replied as Cloud finally turned back and nodded.

"So which of you missed?"

"Neither of us! It would have all worked perfectly." Her voice dropped an octave. "Had Ifrit not kicked the ice out of the way instead of blasting it."

"And, um, Ifrit wound up kicking it towards you..."

Yuffie was silent as Cloud finished speaking and suddenly found his shoes immensely fascinating. Cid glared further and mulled over the new information. He'd been thinking of summons as dumb directable attacks, or at least that was the impression he'd gained from the party and the odd time he'd seen the creatures called into existence. Apparently there was more to them then he'd realised. He sighed.

"So; we gonna conclude it might be best to only have one of the things around at a time, or just not fire them at each other in future?"

"Dunno yet," replied Yuffie. "Wanna help us find out? In the interests of science? Or at least in the art of blowing shit up." She struck what she probably thought was a dramatic pose. Noticing Cid motionless her stance relaxed. "Come on old man, you need the practice anyway."

"One more old man out of you and I am going to call down the strongest summon we have on you," he growled through gritted teeth. He paused a moment and added, "Actually, which is that?"

"Oh, that's Choco-Mog. Yeah, totally most devastating thing we have."

Cloud suppressed a smile as he nodded alongside her. Cid was unconvinced.

"Sounds like a fucking kid's cartoon."

* * *

**A/N:** The idea for this resulted out of a long conversation with Raaj about how the best way to keep Yuffie distracted was to give her an armful of materia and a resonably empty space to try it out.


End file.
